The end of the software suite?
March 27, 2008
There have been rumblings here and there about whether the on-demand software suite might replace the behemoth systems usually found today. Yesterday, I came across this piece on Sandhill by Michael A Braun, CEO of Intacct which purports to support the thesis.
Apart from the fact it is appallingly written, the case it makes is so overblown, muddled, full of hyperbole and short on fact, you’d have to be a complete novice software buyer not to see straight through it.
Fortunately, the media we have access to today allows anyone with an opinion to express how they see a particular story. Needless to say, most commenters (rightly) dismissed it as a piece of puffery, even though whomever really wrote it (it’s usually the PR department), attempted to make the odd good point.
As an exercise in futility, the piece reminded me that regardless of how much you or I might believe in a particular approach to software, there is always the risk of believing your own bullshit to the point of looking faintly ridiculous. This is a good example. As a reality check, it’s not wasted.
More on Xero
March 6, 2008
I promised to say more about Xero and have now had time to sift through some of the customer stories. Regular readers will know I place far more credence on these than I do on what a vendor has to say. They’re encouraging. Even more encouraging are the words of Andrew Sandiford, Head of Business Advisory and Assurance at Target, Chartered Accountants:
Target see themselves as Financial “Guardian Angels” to businesses, and this is now possible using Xero, as Andrew explains:
“We can keep an eye on client’s accounts as and when we want to; we can just login and look at what their current financial situation is, and contact them as required. We offer the monitoring services of an FD to companies that could not afford that level of expertise otherwise. But we can only do this because of how Xero works.”
As to what using Xero means for his Accountancy firm, Andrew is clear: “Xero offers us the unique chance to really be integral to our clients’ businesses like we have never been before. We will add greater value to the relationships we have with existing clients, and I know this will mean we attract more clients in the future.”
The full case study can be found here.
Xero is still very much in the ‘testing the waters’ stage to figure out what works and what doesn’t but even so, having this kind of endorsement from a firm of professionals can only do them good.
I like they’ve organized all the essential data any business needs into a dashboard that’s readily understood. As the old saw goes: a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Having embedded help tips for each section adds value for end users.
It will be interesting to see how Xero progresses in the UK, especially given they’re aiming at the ’spreadsheet hell’ crowd that wants to keep a full set of books but doesn’t want the hassle normally associated with book-keeping, yet is prepared to put the modicum of effort required to do the job properly. That won’t be everyone but the market is large enough for it to be attractive to on-demand players of all kinds.
During my discussions with co-founder Hamish Edwards, we talked about alert mechanisms. I like the idea but figuring out how it works is tricky. As a professional, do you want to know every transaction that might be incorrect, once a day (where applicable), weekly, monthly? Think about this from a marketing perspective. If you’re able to help clients solve their problems in a pro-active manner, then you’re fostering a strong relationship. You’re delivering value by focusing on the most important ’stuff’ and ensuring that clients know you care. That’s simply not possible with desktop and client/server applications.
That’s why, rather than talking about software as a service (saas) I am now leaning towards business as a service or BaaS. That’s how it should be, don’t you think?
So-SAAS or the real deal?
February 9, 2008
Last week, Ed Molyneux and I briefed Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics. As someone who has been on the analyst side of the fence I know it can be a nerve wracking experience. Dale has no illusions about many of the saas/on-demand services he sees and which he described in The Register in these terms:
When I challenged some of the purist SaaS thinking in a blog post recently (see Dissecting SaaS), I got a lot of phone calls and emails from SaaS providers offering to ‘educate’ me on how their particular service was as an example of why the SaaS delivery model was so compelling. After listening to a few of these stories, I was still singularly unimpressed with most of what I heard – essentially far too much ‘me too’ reinventions of traditional applications that typically did less than the solutions they were supposed to be replacing.
This is what Phil Wainewright (who we will be briefing next week) calls So-SaaS. Ed was demonstrating FreeAgent which now has just shy of 500 registrants and is transitioning beta testers onto a paid regime at a steady clip. Dale liked the fact the service puts the user in control or, as he prefers to say:
Interestingly, if you look at service provider authored SaaS applications in this way, i.e. by asking what new they bring to the party in terms of capability, then the SaaS delivery element sometimes becomes a bit of red herring. Will offerings like FreeAgent, for example, be successful because they are SaaS-based or because they fill a gap? – in this case the need for ‘cut the crap’accounting, billing and tax management designed for IT contractors and the like that are not well served by traditional players like Sage.
We believe there is genuine value in cloud computing models especially where it allows for easy collaboration between interested parties. That’s why we encourage professional accountants and customers to work together to get the best out of the system.What is more interesting though is the manner in which our support systems are developing. We use another cloud service, GetSatisfaction.
What we’re seeing is very different to what I expected. Support systems are usually peppered with bug issues that don’t get fixed in a timely fashion and which leave users befuddled. We’re finding that a combination of fast response times (many queries are answered with a few hours) plus appropriate acknowledgment of problems leaves almost all customers happy with the service. We’re also receiving interesting questions about treatment of individual expense line items. That’s unusual. This sometimes strays into the professional accountant’s turf but wherever possible, we provide an answer. Where we can’t, we will happily refer it to a professional who understands the FreeAgent value proposition.
Why is this working as an alternative model for support?My sense is that a combination of cloud models enforces a level of transparency which we cannot avoid and should embrace. Transparency keeps you honest but more important forces the service provider to exercise a level of care that is not required when the service is disconnected from the user. At the very least, it forces other players to question the value of their delivery mechanisms.
Moving Wordpress servers with Yellowpark
January 23, 2008
Wordpress offers you two ways to run a blog - they host it on wordpress.com or you self host. I’ve self hosted for over two years because it gives me the widest possible range of options for plug-ins (additional pieces of functionality) and design. Until yesterday it was hosted at Opensourcehost.com who specialise in hosting open source applications - like Wordpress.
Unfortunately, Opensourcehost’s support deteriorated in recent months and over the course of several weeks I experienced a string of unwelcome site outages. Despite telling them each time an incident arose, Opensourcehost.com support denied there was any problem, despite I could see error logs showing very clearly what was happening. Last weekend was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back when I wanted someone to see a specific page and the site was down - again.
Enter stage left Chris Dalby of Yellowpark. He’s a top person who offers hosting (among other managed services) and hosts my Dinglebum site. It’s a low traffic affair but it just works. Chris has excellent references from James Governor and having tasted Chris’s service it was a no brainer to get him to help me move the site.
Two years and some 2,500 posts later, there’s a fair chunk of data to schlepp from one server to another - 250MB in total. And it has to be done right. The Wordpress backup database tools are fine but as we found, they are not quite what’s required to do a proper export/import. Here you really need the Wordpress phpMyAdmin plugin. There’s a useful tutorial for geeks that explains the procedure. And here’s a guide for doing any form of upgrade to a Wordpress site. Rule no: 1 - backup everything. Which is what Chris did.
Chris then hosted the site at a temporary location while we tested to ensure that everything is working as expected. That meant re-activating a set of plug-ins and then running a visual comparison of the ‘new’ site against the existing. It also meant running a post to ensure it ended up in the right place. Finally, I ran some common functions like using the dashboard, playing with plug-in settings and checking the spam filter to ensure everything had carried over correctly.
The final job required changing the nameservers. Think of a nameserver as the phone book where your domain name (in this case accmanpro.com) is translated into an IP address (in the format 255.255.255.0) located at the hosting provider. Nameserver changes take time to populate, usually 24-48 hours so we decided to leave everything in ‘temporary’ mode until the nameserver providers had done their stuff and just to be 100% sure that everything performed as expected.
I didn’t want to do much of this work as I did not want to run the risk of ending up with database problems that I could not handle. I handed the whole problem over to Chris, granting him admin rights to get the job done. Chris took the problem and made it a non event. That’s what I wanted.
We had a few hiccups along the way, largely because of the database problem but Chris took it all in his stride even when I was staring at a screen of - well - not a lot and wondering what was going on.
Changing service providers can be as traumatic as changing banks and the only way to ensure it’s handled properly is to hand the process over to a professional. Yes, I’m paying Chris for the service he provided. It’s not a huge amount but worth every penny in peace of mind. And as an extra bonues, the site now runs at lightning speed.
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